If I Only Had
by Threepwillow
Summary: Sirius may have run away from home, and Peter may be lacking in Gryffindor courage, and James may have absolutely nothing between his ears, but maybe Remus Lupin has got a heart, after all. :::MWPP oneshot, Remus/Sirius, written for a friend's birthday:::


_"As for you, my galvanized friend, you want a heart. You don't know how lucky you are not to have one. Hearts will never be practical until they can be made unbreakable."_

-xxx-

It is Remus's fifth year, and Sirius Black has bought himself a brand new pair of trainers, and Remus can't stop _staring_ at them.

He's done it to infuriate his family, and Remus must say, he's done a fairly excellent job of it. They're Muggle shoes, for one, with wide white rubber soles and laces up to his ankles and a big star with some Muggle bloke's signature under it at the insides of his anklebones. They make his feet look a bit bigger than they actually are. For another, they're a furious crimson, screaming Gryffindor with every footstep. Remus suspects that they started off a brighter, truer shade of red and Sirius has charmed them this color, but if he has he's done a very good job of that, too. And, as Sirius has so eloquently pointed out to him (and James, and Peter, and half the common room and anyone else who will listen to him pontificate about them), they are _so punk rock_. They are everything that good, upstanding, Slytherin Blacks hate about their not-so-prodigal son, wrapped up into two size-9 red canvas and rubber abominations. (Sirius also assures them all that while his shoe size may seem average, it is in no way a reflection on the size of other parts of him, which are far above.)

He wears them everywhere, and considering Remus's eyes seem to have permanently affixed to them, this is somewhat of an inconvenience. They peek out from under his robes in the halls, and Remus ends up walking right into seventh-year Kingsley Shacklebolt. He has to crane his neck a good ways to make eye contact.

"Er, sorry," he whines, clutching his schoolbag closer to himself.

"I'd advise you to watch where you're going a bit better next time, Lupin," Shacklebolt says, and though he says it quite politely the bass of it quivers through Remus's chest and is frightening anyway. He hurries on to Transfiguration and hopes that next year's Head Boy isn't quite so, well, huge. To his relief, Sirius's feet have already rounded the corner ahead of him.

They're dangling off the sides of his broom at Quidditch matches, even though all the other players have told him he's daft and should be wearing wizarding athletic shoes because they've been charmed to keep him on better alignment with his broom. Sirius scoffs, says there's nothing against them in the uniform code for matches, and smacks a Bludger into the Hufflepuff who's got the Quaffle just as well as he ever has (which is not very, but he more than makes up for it with enthusiasm). James snatches it up as the other Chaser drops it, and they score again, and everyone in the Gryffindor section of the stands roars for James as they break 100 points.

Everyone but Remus, who isn't looking at James at all, because he can't take his eyes from the shoes, and from Sirius. He doesn't much go for Quidditch, never has, but two of his best friends in the world will probably play it until the day they each die, so he feels he ought to support them now, especially since James has been made captain, and as only a fifth year, even. Remus usually tries to occupy himself at the games by trying to find the Snitch before the Seekers do, peering around with a knockoff pair of Omnioculars that Peter had given him for his birthday in third year, as Carmina Spitz and Lou Abbott weave around the pitch; but today he's left the Omnioculars in his bag and left his eyes to their own devices, which apparently means one Gryffindor Beater and nothing else. The Bludger goes to him, and away, and to him, and away, and he screams loudly at a call their new referee has made - Hooch, is it? Sirius doesn't like her very much compared to the old one - and then suddenly it's over, and Lou has got the Snitch, and Hufflepuff was down just far enough for it to come out a tie. Sirius whines about it all the way back to the common room - "why would he do that if it was just going to tie it, I guess he knew that they didn't have a chance of winning, serves them right with such crap Chasers as theirs, and now we have to play Hufflepuff _again_ and next time it will probably be raining" - but Remus ignores most of it, and only interjects three or four times to say anything at all, and one of those times it is only to remind Sirius to _Scourgify_ his shoes or the mud will stay caked on them and never come out again.

"I knew you liked them," Sirius teases, and Remus cannot come up with a response to that that doesn't sound absolutely miserable.

As Sirius climbs up into his stool in Potions class the following week, he wedges them against the rung around the bottom, his right leg jiggling at the knee with restless energy, which makes the right shoe wobble back and forth. He's hunched over a cauldron with James - they're both about half-and-half at Potions, and Professor Slughorn always does a good job of pairing up students in such a way that balances out their skills. For example, Elsbeth Carlisle, the Ravenclaw girl that Remus has to stare past to see Sirius's trainers, is quite good at Potions, and Remus himself is pretty much rubbish.

"Oi, Lupin," she hisses, snapping her fingers in his face. "No wonder you're so bad at this, you never bloody pay attention. Pass me that pestle and mortar with the crushed daffodils, will you?"

Remus does so, and carefully, remembering vaguely a mention Slughorn had made that there was some sort of poison in narcissus flowers. He's been more distracted than usual today, with the shoes _and_ an upcoming full moon. Elsbeth rolls her eyes and takes it from him gracelessly, and he gives an embarrassed cough. Clearly, the poison isn't in _this_ part of the plant. She shovels the pasty yellow substance into their potion and it turns a pale, watery pink.

"A few more good stirs and that should do it, then," says Elsbeth.

"But wait," says Remus, "this...doesn't look quite right, does it?" He scratches nervously at his nose, using the motion as an excuse to shoot another glance at Sirius's fidgeting feet. "It's usually quite more...shiny, than this."

Elsbeth rolls her eyes again, this time accompanied by an all-suffering sigh, and lectures him as she continues to stir their cauldron. "Lupin, are you quite - look. We obviously can't make _real_ Amortentia, can we? It's quite dangerous. And to be honest, I don't trust some people in this room not to nick some, if it were real. We're making it so that we understand the chemistry behind potions that manipulate emotions, but we're leaving out the last two ingredients so that it doesn't catalyze into actual love potion. Which you would have remembered had you actually listened to a single thing Professor Slughorn had said, instead of staring off into space. What _are_ you staring at, anyway?"

"Nothing," Remus lies, because it really isn't anything, is it? It's someone's _shoes_, for Merlin's sake. That's not really anything at all.

"But what I'm most excited about," Elsbeth continues, almost nothing more a bee-like buzz in the back of Remus's head, "is what it _smells_ like. I've always wanted to know what mine's going to be..." She stops stirring and inhales extravagantly. "Oh, wow! It's carnations, and crisp new parchment, and...Loch Warlock aftershave?" Her face colors as she looks beyond Remus, to some boy or other that he can't see. His eyes are fixed on Sirius's trainers again, and his face is fixed in an expression of desperate, pleading frustration, because it's so close to the full moon and he can smell _everything_, can smell thick rich dark chocolate and cheap shampoo and expensive tea with honey and mud and wet dog and something he doesn't recognize, but which is just enough like sodden fabric and _boy_ that it is probably those bloody shoes. And Remus cannot tell if it is coming from the cauldron in front of him or the real thing, sitting three tables away.

"What about you?" Elsbeth prompts, as if she's actually interested, which Remus knows she isn't.

He falters for a minute before he can bring himself to answer. "Er, not much," he says, scratching at his nose again. "Can't quite smell anything, really. I've, er, got a bit of a head cold."

She's gazing dreamily over his shoulder again, and he hopes to god that this isn't what he looks like. "Or maybe," she says, voice distant and distracted, and he hopes to god that isn't what he _sounds_ like, "you've just got no heart."

Remus, who can still see the red shoes even with his eyes screwed shut, only wishes that were true.

-xxx-

It is Remus's sixth year, and there's a Slug Club party coming up, and none have them have got dates.

Remus points out to James and Peter that technically he and Sirius _are_ their dates; a star Quidditch player and prefect and the nephew (or cousin by marriage, or something-or-other twice removed, Remus can never keep it straight) of a master wizarding chef certainly make Slughorn's cut, but the runaway Black black sheep and a bookish halfblood werewolf rather don't, even if Remus is a prefect too. Slughorn has long since learned, however, that you can't have more than one of them anywhere without having all of them, because whoever's left will make any occasion a living hell, and he's so reluctant to give up either Peter or James that, though Sirius and Remus don't receive invitations per se, Slughorn never turns them away.

Peter fusses and tells Remus not to talk about blokes being other blokes' dates, and Remus frowns a little into his tea.

They spend a week on it. Sirius's strategy seems to be "ask girls that are reasonably attractive until one of them says yes." It takes him until about Thursday to hit gold, and gold it is, a sunny-haired Hufflepuff fifth year with a wide, shining smile. Remus feels sorry for her almost instantly - clearly, she's only been duped into this because unlike the other girls who have all turned Sirius down, Bonnie Nichols doesn't know that being Sirius's "date" to anything usually turns into being Sirius's "someone to snog for no reason when everything else gets boring."

A small, underdog vein of thought in the back of Remus's head says that the Slug Club parties _do_ get quite boring and that snogging Sirius would probably fix that rather nicely, but the rational parts of his mind quickly cast _Silencio!_ on it. Or something.

James, of course, rarely takes dates to these things, since the girl he most wants to attend them with is already invited separately. But lately she's been bringing a Ravenclaw bloke named Eugene Corner, and this is just Not On with James, so he decides he's got to find someone to bring, too. Supposedly this will make Lily jealous and send her running into his powerful Quidditch-toned arms. Sirius laughs and chucks a shoe at him (muddy and smelly and with the laces falling apart but the same brilliant, _brilliant_ red). He's already got a date, of course, and is allowed to laugh at the rest of them now, when six hours ago he was in a similar state of witchless panic.

"Don't worry, James," Remus tells him. "I probably won't have a date at all."

"Moony's one true love lives at Honeydukes and comes in thirty, fifty-five, and eighty percent cocoa," Sirius says.

James offers Remus the shoe to throw back at Sirius's head, but Remus opts for a pillow off the common room sofa and a good _Wingardium leviosa_. He doesn't know if he could ever touch the trainers themselves. Something cataclysmically wrong would probably happen.

They rib Prongs good-naturedly for another thirty minutes or so, and that's about all he can take before setting out into the castle to find someone. Remus warns him not to use the Sirius method, and quickly gets his pillow back.

With James gone, however, Peter starts to whine. "Oh, if he gets a date too, then I'll be the only one."

"You and Moony," Sirius says pointedly. "Surely he counts."

"But he doesn't _want_ one," says Peter, "he pretty much said so himself."

"I never said that," says Remus softly, but he doesn't push it. He wants a date. A very specific date. But that date has already got a date, and her name is Bonnie Nichols, and Remus suddenly goes from feeling incredibly sorry for her to feeling rather jealous.

Peter doesn't push it. "I wish birds just asked blokes out, instead of the other way around. It'd be much easier, you think? Always so hard to tell what they're thinking, but I feel like we're pretty cut and dry."

"Unless you're Sirius," Remus says. "His mind's always working in twisted ways I can't understand."

"You want the other shoe?"

"Do you want to continue to _have_ two shoes?"

"Damn right I do, I've got to wear them to the party, haven't I?" Remus's face grows pale, and to cover it he puts on a false expression of shock, pretends to be appalled that Sirius would wear trainers to a formal event, when in reality his stomach is filling with dread at the thought that he is going to end up staring at Sirius's feet the entire party.

"_Anyway_, Wormy, you've just got to man it up!" Sirius is saying when he snaps back into the conversation. "Come on, where's your Gryffindor courage? Where're your bloody bollocks?"

"I'm blaming _them_ for my voice cracking every time I try to talk to Elsbeth Carlisle!" he shouts back, and then shrinks into his armchair even smaller, somehow. "Oh, Merlin, no, I've said it now..."

Sirius grins. "Elsbeth! Not bad, Pete! Funny, never took you for going after Ravenclaws. I can see it now, though. She's quite pushy, likes to be right all the time and boss people around, so it's perfect for you, innit."

"Sod off, Sirius." Peter looks as though he's about to cry, and Remus edges toward the end of the couch that's closest to him, trying to be comforting in the face of Sirius's mockery.

"No, really, you ought to go for it. She's got a nice rack, at any rate. Just catch her in the Great Hall at dinner and try to act casual. Impress her with your Sluggish connections and dazzle her with your - er - "

"_Exactly_," says Peter, groaning hopelessly. "I don't want her to just use me as a Slug Club ticket. I want this to be the real deal. Ever since Potions last year...that unit we did on love potions, you know? I kept looking at her, wondering if that'd be the only way I'd ever have a chance."

"That's a right spineless way to go," says Sirius. "I knew you were a rat, but really. What's so hard about the words 'Hey, Carlisle, you, me, Tuesday night, Slug Club'? That's not even full sentences, that's - "

"Unlike _you_, Sirius, most people don't like it when the people they're attracted to laugh in their faces," Remus snaps, finally fed up with it.

"Prongs seems to."

"Prongs is touched in the head." Remus turns to Peter, doing his best (and failing miserably, of course, but it's the thought that counts) to ignore Sirius. "Look, Pete, you and Sirius are quite different people - "

"Shocking, I know - "

" - and what manages to work for him every once in a while, though Merlin knows how, is not going to work for you. I think you ought to just tell her how you feel, fully, and _honestly_. You're so bloody genuine, there's no way she'll take it for heartless flattery like the way _some people_ operate, and I think it could actually be quite endearing. Tell her you've fancied her since Potions last year and that you'd really like this Slug Club date to be the first of many, and if you can get through that much without puking, then the worst that can happen after that is that she says no."

Peter and Sirius are both staring at him now, blinking confusedly like what he's just said is the strangest thing he's ever told them (a title Remus is pretty sure _actually_ belongs to _Well, lads, I'm a werewolf_). Peter still looks like he could cry at any second, but they've got the capacity to be happy tears now, and Sirius's mouth is just agog.

"Oh, Moony, you're the _greatest_," Peter gushes. "Why is it that you haven't got a date, anyway?"

"I've got no heart," he tells them, a faint memory of what Elsbeth had told him that week in Potions last year.

"Yeah, only a stomach," says Sirius, finally snapping out of his awe. (He never misses an opportunity to make jokes about Remus's fondness for chocolate. The funny thing is that Remus's sweet tooth isn't even that prominent any more, but Sirius is king of blowing offhanded statements out of proportion.)

"Well, that settles it," says Peter, standing up from his armchair and puffing his chest pitifully. "Tonight at dinner, I'm just going to have to tell Elsbeth how I feel!" But he slumps again, looking down at his shoes, and Sirius's discarded one that lays next to them. "Bollocks or no bollocks."

"That's the spirit!" crows Sirius, rising to clap an arm around his shoulders. "By the end of the day we shall all have dates. Since, you know, I think Sluggy's going to have chocolate gateau at his party."

"Brilliant," says Remus, indulging him, because if possible, Sirius's mismatched feet - one bright trainer, one fading argyle sock - are even more captivating than before.

Then he remembers something else. "Oh, Pete?"

"Yeah Moony?"

"Have you got any, er, Loch Warlock aftershave?"

-xxx-

It is Remus's seventh year, and he's supposed to be studying for his NEWTs, but instead he is having to confront a rather appalling realization.

Everyone else is at the Quidditch match. _Everyone_ else. It's the last game of the year and the winner of this match, Slytherin or Gryffindor, will pretty much decide who wins the Cup. It's been quite a while since Gryffindor's won it, if Remus recalls correctly - before James got ahold of the team and whipped them into shape, they hadn't been so good, and it has taken all of his captaining prowess and a good bit of Sirius's shouting to turn them into anything with a fighting chance. But if they don't win the Cup this year James will probably cry, and so far they've been playing quite brilliantly - or so Remus has heard. Remus just can't bring himself to go to Quidditch matches any more, because it is just so hard to watch.

Which brings his circular thoughts back to the matter at hand, which is one Sirius Orion "Padfoot" Black, Gryffindor Quidditch Beater, Animagus, and self-proclaimed Sex God. Sirius is at the Quidditch match, naturally, since everyone is, and he's on the team anyway. Not at the Quidditch match, however, are the red trainers that have all but lived on Sirius's feet for the past two and a half years.

"It's just no use, mate," he'd said to James, quite sadly.

"What isn't?"

"My bloody shoes. Worn 'em out, and I could probably keep wearing them around regular as long as I'm careful but I don't think I can play Quidditch in them."

"So don't play in them, prat. Geez, you're agonizing over this like a bloody girl."

"They're my _shoes_," he'd whined, but he'd abandoned them for his regular Quidditch things, and now they lay sad and defeated by the cold fireplace, half-unlaced and looking terribly pitiful without Sirius's feet in them.

Remus finds himself staring at them, naturally, but only as he thinks of them in particular. They've got none of their usual pull, which was starting to make Remus feel quite weird, until he let the appalling realization sink into him. Now, of course, he is feeling even weirder, but at least it is explainable.

He has been staring - not at the shoes, but at _Sirius_ - for two and half bloody years. And that could end up proving a bit of a problem.

Remus can't go to Quidditch matches any more because it is so, so hard to watch gorgeous wind-tossed Sirius Black stream about the pitch looking sexy and know that nearly the entire Hogwarts population also got to look at him that way. He'd felt flickers of jealousy, stabs of desire here and there, but he'd always shrugged them off, and that had been that. He was Remus Lupin and he had no heart. But just as it's hard to think about Sirius's trainers only being a couple years old, and not being permanently affixed to his feet, so too is it hard for Remus to comprehend that these feelings have been loitering about in the back of his not-heart since the first term of their fifth year. This is why he's never had a steady girlfriend. This is why he stares.

This, unfortunately, might be love.

And one is definitely not supposed to be in love with one's self-proclaimed Sex God of a best mate.

With a long, exhaled breath of frustration, Remus stops even pretending to focus on his Potions notes and flops his head back over the top of the sofa, effectively turning the common room on its head. It's an interesting perspective from which to examine the world, and it feels about right at the moment. Everything inside of him feels upside-down, too. It's also an interesting perspective from which to watch someone climb through the portrait hole. Remus starts and checks his watch - surely the match isn't over yet? - but the person is alone, and the person is _crying_, and oh, Merlin, the person is Lily Evans.

Remus knows immediately that this is Bad. This is worse than when Sirius ran away from home two summers ago, effectively making enemies out of every other Black and half-Black and random Slytherin friend-of-Black in the school and beyond. This is worse than the straight month and a half of detentions that all four of them had gotten for switching around the portraits and statues that opened each common room so that no one could get into the right House. This is even worse than the huge row that Peter and James had when Peter, upon confessing his undying love to Elsbeth Carlisle, was told that she already had a date - a date who, they all found out at the Slug Club party, happened to be James. (Remus doesn't think Peter has quite forgiven him yet, and that was over a year ago.) Lily Evans is a Strong, Righteous Woman. Lily Evans does not cry. Lily Evans is the kind of girl that other girls go to when _they_ are crying, who hugs them and tells them that it's all right and that wizards are buffoons and in general pretends very convincingly to be their mums. If Lily Evans is crying, it is undoubtedly much worse than Gryffindor having lost the match to Slytherin.

She notices him and comes to a halt, standing with her arms very rigidly at her sides and her shoulders sort of scrunched up. "_Why is James bloody Potter such a bloody idiot?_"

Remus, having heard numerous people ask this exact question, can think of many truthful answers almost immediately. Somehow, though, none of them seem to be right, and he indicates vaguely that she should sit in the armchair to his left before speaking. "Merlin, Evans, what's wrong?"

"Your stupid _mate_ is what's wrong," she sniffles out as she sits. "God, I can't believe this."

"Believe what?"

"He thinks he's some _hot-shot_, flying around on his broomstick, showing off, wasting time. They're destroying Slytherin out there, by the way."

"Good," says Remus. "But, er - "

"So he _obviously_ doesn't need to be paying too much attention to the game, when they're winning so solidly. So he _obviously_ has plenty of time to make suggestive faces at me where I'm sitting in our section of the stands. And so _what_ if I'm there? It's not like I'm just there to see _him_, bloody _everyone_ is at this match, it's a big bloody deal, _isn't it_?"

"Er, yes, it is, I suppose," says Remus, not wanting to contradict a Lily Evans who is both weeping and using the word _bloody_ so much. Still, she hasn't quite said anything that would convince him of the need for tears yet.

"So because that bloody idiot has nothing between his ears but - but _dead flies and bits of fluff_ like the _bloody_ school song, he is of course paying more attention to _me_ and his adoring fans than he is to Rex Rosworth, and takes a big cracking Bludger to the back of his own stupid head!" she screams. "And so he falls right into the stands, right on top of me and poor Alice Finch, with this stupid, _stupid_ grin on his face, bleeding from the head, probably concussed, and they're whisking him off to the hospital wing and playing out the rest of the match with Prewett acting as captain and Brown filling in the other Chaser spot and it's _all b-because of me._" She's disintegrated back into sobs again, her face buried in her hands, and Remus has absolutely nothing to say. Crying girls don't really fall under his area of expertise, any more than the essay on the ethics of Veritaserum that's laying across his lap does.

"Don't you see, Lupin?" she whispers after a moment, once she's managed to pull herself the tiniest bit back together. "He's _won_."

At the risk of sounding like an idiot, Remus asks, "Er, won what, exactly?"

"This stupid fight that he's been putting up for five years," she says, wiping her eyes with the heel of her hand, though it accomplishes very little. Remus suddenly wishes he had a handkerchief to offer her. "I'm bloody in love with him."

Remus blinks solidly, once or twice, and swallows. "A...are you now?"

"I don't know how this bloody _happened_, Lupin," she says, sounding desperate. "What in the world do I possibly see in his dumb posturing and arrogance and his stupid - stupid hair, and his...ugh, I can't even think of more things about him that are awful any more! This time last year I could have written you an essay four feet long! But now it's just his bloody _smile_ and his bloody perfect _hazel eyes_ and how tall he is and how much I like the sound of _Lily Potter_ and oh, Lupin, maybe I'm the one that hasn't got a brain, after all."

"Well, if neither of you has got one," he says weakly, "then perhaps you're right for each other after all."

She laughs at this, sputtering through her tears, but it fades quickly, replaced by gritting teeth. "Oh, and I've certainly done it now, haven't I," she says, harsh this time. "I've picked him instead of Sev."

Remus doesn't ask, but this time he doesn't need to. He knows. Lily Evans and Severus Snape have the strangest friendship he's ever witnessed, and as much as he himself can't stand the grease-covered Slytherin - no little part of it envy of his Potions prowess - he's always tried to be civil about it around Lily. In light of this recent development, James will most definitely not be doing the same.

"I just _know_ James is going to be the biggest arsehole about all of this," says Lily. "Sev has said some unkind things to all of us before, but that's just who he _is_, you have to see, and I've always meant...so much to him." She huffs, and a few more tears splatter down onto her skirt. "James is just going to be _insufferable_. Promise me, Lupin. Promise me you won't let him make this into a Snivellus thing. Do whatever you have to."

If it means Lily Evans will stop crying, and turn his world right-side up again, Remus will promise anything. "Absolutely, Evans," he says. "Even James has got to have a brain in there somewhere."

"Thank you," she says, "thank you so - " A huge roar from out the window interrupts her, and both of them can guess at the cause: Spitz has caught the Snitch, the game is over. Lily laughs a bit more, and rises from the chair.

"Think I'm going to go back to my room before it explodes in here," she says, brushing the tears from her eyes again, and this time making a good bit of headway. "I'd like a bit of time alone about this."

"Makes sense," he says. Even if his own alone time hadn't been doing him much good.

She takes a few steps toward the stairs up to the girls' dormitories, but suddenly turns back and looks at him. "Is it - is it always so hard?"

"Is what, now?"

"Being in love with one of them?"

Remus's face goes white, but even as it does, he realizes that he's been taking another look at the floppy, lifeless red canvas trainers by the hearth. "I - " he says, but there's nothing he can even say to contradict it. Lily knows. And Remus finds that he doesn't particularly care any more. Maybe this realization isn't so appalling after all.

"Yes," he says, finally. "But it's worth it."

-xxx-

It is Remus's eighth year - not his eighth year of school, of course, there's only seven years of that, but his eighth year of knowing Sirius Black. His seventh-and-a-half year of being friends with him, his sixth year of truly being Marauders with him, and his fourth year of being irrevocably in love with him.

He works for a Muggle coffee shop by day and for the Order of the Phoenix by night. (It's his first year of that, but Remus can tell that it will not be his last.) People he knew quite well in school have died. Their parents have died, their Muggle relatives, their friends. Some Muggles with no connection to the wizarding world at all have died as well. People at the coffee shop always ask him why he looks so weary, if he's had enough sleep. They think it's funny that the person who's serving them caffeinated drinks seems to look like he needs one or two himself. Remus lets them chuckle at him; it's safest, and it's easy. Then he goes home, gets the post, has a bite or two to eat, and sneaks about with the Prewett brothers trying to sniff out Death Eaters on their side of London.

It's hard, Remus thinks, to be immersed in a time of danger without anyone around to love - without anything lovely to give you a reprieve from the awful. His parents have gone into hiding - his mother was active (as she well had the right to be, he supposed) in the civil rights movement for humanoid "dark creatures," and they know her face, and the face of her Muggle husband. James has Lily, of course, and Lily has James; the Prewetts have each other, and their sister, and her husband, and the three (or is it four?) children they have popped out over the past few years, almost ludicrously quickly. Alice Finch has Frank Longbottom. Peter has some girl that works for his uncle or cousin or whomever, who apparently makes wonderful sweets.

Remus has a spare, chilly flat, with grey-blue walls and a threadbare sofa and, for pretenses, a Muggle television (that doesn't actually work). He has a kitchen without much in it, a whole lot of books collecting dust on their shelves, a wardrobe full of clothes that wear thinner and thinner. He has very, very small paychecks.

He also has a knock on the door.

Rising from the sofa, where he has been flipping through his post to discover two bills for the flat and even more horrible-sounding correspondence from Dumbledore, he crosses absently to the door, and opens it without really looking up.

But Remus doesn't need to look up, because the shoes give it all away.

"Sirius? Whah - why?" Remus sputters.

"To confer, converse and otherwise hob-nob with my brother wizards," Sirius says, with the stilted air that usually means he is quoting something, a source that Remus doesn't know. He probably figures this out when Remus's baffled expression doesn't change. "Sorry." He sweeps a hand through his overlong hair, casual, pale wiry forearm slipping out from the rolled-up sleeve of a rumpled dark-blue button-down shirt. "I just...well, um, did James tell you he's proposing to Lily tonight?"

"Er, yeah," says Remus, though he doesn't understand what this has to do with anything, and Dumbledore's letter is slowly crumpling in his left hand.

"Well, so, they're going to get their own place, aren't they, and probably have a baby or something ridiculous like that, which means I can't exactly keep sleeping on Prongs's couch, you know?"

"Oh." Remus supposes he should have thought of that. Slowly this is starting to make sense, but he isn't sure he likes the way it's going.

"Yeah. Er, can I - ?"

"Yes, come in, sorry." Remus sets his mail down on the counter separating the tiny kitchen from the rest of the space before it's destroyed irreparably, and Sirius follows in after him, looking around, trainers squeaking with their newness on the hard floor. Remus notices he has a small rucksack hanging at one hip, and now he definitely does not like the way this is going.

"I like the...er...well the color of the walls is nice," Sirius says, trying to find some way to compliment the horrible space.

"No, no, this whole place is rubbish, trust me," Remus says. "Except for the shower, it's decent. And the neighbors are quiet and keep to themselves."

"Sounds great," says Sirius. He plunks down hard on the sofa. He appears to be testing it out for something. This is just not okay.

"Sirius," says Remus, "are you trying to ask if you can move in?"

"Not move in!" Sirius says hastily. "Just crash here, for a few days. Month or two at the most. I've been looking for a place of my own, honestly I have, but this whole popping the question thing with Prongs sort of happened faster than I was expecting, and it's hard finding something that's close enough to the Ministry if I'm to go in for Auror training soon - "

"Look, Padfoot, I just don't think this is going to work."

Sirius face falls significantly, and he looks genuinely hurt. "Oh, but Moony, how come?"

Remus's gaze is locked with his, and he can see that Sirius's eyes are sort of the same color as the walls of his flat. His shirt is sort of the same color as the glossy shining spots in his hair. His skin is sort of the same color as the smooth hot milk that Remus squirts into people's lattes all day. And his shoes are the same color as the blood that is pumping hot and hard through Remus's veins, making his head spin and his breath hitch and his voice say very, very stupid things.

"Because if you live in my flat, I am not going to be able to pretend any more," his traitorous mouth says. "I am not going to be able to stop my face from blushing when you make lewd jokes. I am not going to be able to avoid thinking about you when you're using my shower. I am going to want to make breakfast for you like a bloody housewife and sleep with you in my bed. And I am not going to be able to keep myself from _staring_ at you and your goddamn _shoes_."

It takes Sirius's goddamn shoes, and the feet inside them, less than half a second to shoot him across the bare floor and plough him into Remus, backing him hard against the little counter that splits the room and, for some strange and inexplicable reason, kissing Remus hard across the mouth. Though he's still trying to wrap his head around it, Remus isn't stupid enough to not kiss _back_, not when this is the fourth year of wanting to do this almost every waking minute of the day. It continues on for quite some time, long enough for Remus to ponder on everything he's ever noticed about Sirius. He thinks about his stormy grey eyes (the fourth or fifth thing), half-lidded and then closed all the way as the kiss goes deeper and yet higher at the same time. He thinks about his long, coarse hands (the second thing) as they grip him at the hips and tug, about his deceptively soft hair (the eighth or ninth thing) as it spills over Remus's own shoulder, his sharp voice (the third thing) as it moans and stutters, just a little, against his mouth. He thinks about the feet that his own are knocking into toe-to-toe (the first thing, obviously). And he thinks, now, about Sirius's apparent desire to kiss him for so long that they're both running out of air, and how inconvenient it is that this is the thing Remus has noticed last of all.

"So," Sirius says eventually, in breathless words through panting lips (the twelfth thing). "If I, ah, if I let you do all those things - let you stare at me and think dirty poofy thoughts about me in the shower and make me eggs every day since it's the only thing you cook worth a damn - _then_ can I stay here?"

"If you do _that_ again," says Remus, "I may never let you leave."

Sirius does, thick and soft and forceful and mindblowing but for nowhere near as long, and then throws his rucksack at the sofa and grins hugely. "Guess I ought to make myself at home, then."

"Home," Remus echoes. Home is something Sirius hasn't rightly had for a long time - no, he chose to be a good person instead of have a home, to stand up for what he loved and believed in rather than share a roof with those who didn't. He made homes at Hogwarts, at James's place, but those were always temporary, and Sirius knew that. In a way that almost frightens Remus, he is already hoping that here, together, the two of them will have something permanent. He wants to give Sirius something that he has never had before, and to the son of a rich pureblooded family, this may be the only thing left.

Sirius is walking slowly down the hall, in search of the bedroom, and Remus sneaks behind him and pushes him gently in the right direction before latching onto him in a way that makes Sirius laugh but to Remus is deadly serious. They tumble onto the thick cream-colored comforter on Remus's creaky bed, and Sirius rolls over in Remus's arms, and grins again, in a decidedly naughtier way than before. He rocks a little, creaking the bed on purpose. Remus snatches a pillow and smushes it into his face.

"You know, Moony," says Sirius, "perhaps you have got a heart after all."

Remus kisses _him_ this time, and starts unbuttoning his shirt, and Sirius toes off his red trainers and lets them fall to the bedroom floor.


End file.
